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I am not a newbie by any stretch of the imagination...except when it comes to RAID setup and Windows 7 - I have always used RAID in Linux or Our servers already come with RAID already prebuilt. Anyhow, I am installing Windows 7 64 bit on an Asus P5N-D motherboard. It has an onboard NVIDIA Raid controller built-in (which I am aware is not a true hardware RAID, so no reason to debate about that).

Anyhow, I have to 1 TB drives in the box. I went into the BIOS, enabled RAID and selected both. I went into the post POST section to configure the RAID (essentially, the NVRAID utility), set it up as mirrored, selected the two drives - says it is healthty, etc.

When I was installing windows 7 (clean install of course), when it came to the drive selection screen, it showed only 1 1TB volume, which is what I would expect.

However, I did not at this point try to install Windows. I had drivers for the RAID setup and so I selected the Load Drivers option. There were three drivers total that I had, so I installed all three. No problems. Windows is installing fine.

However, I am a little confused now that I have gotten to this point that it always showed only one drive. Is this because Windows 7 more than likely already had the driver contained on the installation media?

How can I tell if indeed the RAID is setup and working properly? Thanks!

The Raid is set up at the hardware level. Windows has no clue about anything other that what it is being told. If you want to be able to get any info from the raid controller you will need to get the RAIDTool application from the nVidia driver pack. http://www.nvidia.com/Download/index.aspx?lang=en-us

Thanks for the responses everyone. I did not even think of the difference between the hardware abstraction and attempting a software RAID. All is working perfectly and the NVIDIA RAID console is a great tool. Thanks for the link!